Overpass, Tom A. Smith, Shelf Lives and a conveyor belt of future favourites prove Stockton’s multi-venue new music festival is becoming seriously difficult to ignore

★★★★★

There’s a particular joy in watching a band you’ve barely heard of in a small room and realising, halfway through the second song, that they might not be playing rooms this size for much longer.

That’s the whole point of The Gathering Sounds.

More than 1,000 music fans descended on Stockton-on-Tees on Saturday as more than 50 artists took over seven stages for ten hours of running between venues, hurried pints, inevitable clashes and the occasional accidental discovery that ends up becoming the highlight of your day.

And there were plenty of those.

Birmingham’s overpass showed exactly why their stock continues to rise, delivering the sort of widescreen indie built for considerably bigger stages. Big melodies, bigger choruses and a crowd already well versed in the words made their set at The Point feel less like watching an emerging band and more like catching one midway through its ascent.

Across town, Sunderland’s Tom A. Smith provided one of the day’s proper North East moments. A natural live performer with songs to back up the confidence, Smith packed The Georgian Theatre and underlined just how far he has come while retaining the rawness that made people pay attention in the first place.

Shelf Lives provided another of the day’s glorious curveballs, with vocalist Sabrina Di Giulio and guitarist/producer Jonny Hillyard turning their collision of electro-punk, distorted guitars and filthy electronic beats into something that felt halfway between a gig and a particularly unhinged house party. Fresh from releasing debut album hypernormaL earlier this year, the London-based pair have already taken their brilliantly abrasive live show everywhere from Glastonbury and SXSW to Green Man and The Great Escape, and in Stockton it wasn’t difficult to see why their reputation continues to grow. Loud, wired and deliberately difficult to categorise, Shelf Lives were exactly the kind of booking Gathering Sounds gets right.

But Gathering Sounds works best when things get a little less predictable.

VLURE were magnificent. The Glasgow outfit’s collision of post-punk, industrial electronics and full-throttle rave euphoria turned The Georgian into something closer to a club at 2am, while TTSSFU brought a woozier proposition to The Social Room, wrapping the place in shoegaze haze and distorted guitars.

Then came the names you scribble down for later.

Esmeralda Road justified the growing noise surrounding them, while Little Grandad proved why their wonderfully loose take on alt-country and indie has caught NME’s attention. Basht. brought Belfast bite, and Shelf Lives supplied another gloriously abrasive reminder that guitar music in 2026 remains at its best when nobody can quite agree what genre it belongs to.

Crucially, the North East wasn’t merely making up the numbers. Marketplace, Charlie Floyd, Swindled, Daisy Brown and George Bailey were part of a regional contingent capable of standing comfortably alongside the national touring acts.

That balance is what makes Gathering Sounds work.

This isn’t a festival where you plant yourself in front of one stage and wait for the headliner. Stockton becomes the festival site. You move, explore, miss things, discover things and inevitably finish the day arguing with your mates about who stole it.

The Gathering Sounds returns on Saturday 25 September 2027.

Based on this year, you’d be wise to get there before everyone else catches on.

★★★★★